PLAZA

by Shane M Brown

  'They're very steep stairs,' agreed Ethan. 'And there's a lot of them. Like seventy steps or so.'

  'There's seventy-five steps leading down to the east bunker antechamber,' corrected the small man. 'They have an eight inch depth and a seven inch rise. The stairwell is 1.25 meters wide and runs fifteen meters down into the ground. You picked the right set of stairs. The east bunker stairs are inclined six degrees less.'

  Ethan was amazed. The numbers were right. Dead right. And the man was correct about the slight variation between the bunkers. Very few people knew that. Even fewer could recite the details with such accuracy. 'Who the hell are you people?'

  'Never mind that. Why was Rourke in the east bunker?'

  Ethan didn't hesitate. He wasn't a good liar, and he didn't see any reason to start now. 'He wanted me to translate something. I tricked him into going down the east bunker so I could push him down the stairs. He was bragging that he had found something in the Gallery, and I'm guessing that's the same thing you're here for?'

  The two gunmen exchanged glances.

  They pointed Ethan towards the exit. 'Let's find out.'

  #

  Standing with Gordon, Spader ran his palm over the Gallery's carvings.

  He'd seen pictures of the wall carvings dozens of times, but the gruesome artwork still stunned him.

  'They're so...lifelike,' commented Gordon, following just behind. 'I've never seen work like this. I mean the detail...it's just incredible. I wouldn't have believed that stone as a medium could capture the facial expressions so well.'

  'What do you think of the theme?' asked Spader.

  'A bit predictable. They're hardly going to use the artwork to roll out the welcome mat. When you think about it, the ghastlier the threat, the more they're trying to protect. If they had carvings of flowers and hummingbirds, I'd think we were in the wrong place.'

  'That was my sense too,' agreed Spader. 'So you think we're in the right place then?'

  'This way,' said Gordon, smiling enigmatically, passing Spader and following the navigation ropes and mushroom lights. Spader followed Gordon closely. Gordon was excited, and when he got like this, it was best if Spader kept a close eye on him. Also, it was best not to disturb Gordon when he was working.

  Overall, what little of the Gallery was accessible seemed fairly uncomplicated. The Gallery was essentially a grid of chamber-like intersections.

  The strange barricades were the problem.

  The random structures blocked the corridors all over the place. One type was negotiable, the other wasn't. One was a barrier with a triangular aperture, the other a barrier with no aperture. Spader couldn't discern any pattern in their locations.

  Using a small aerosol spray can, he tagged every intersection they passed with dye. Randerson had suggested the invisible dye. Each of his team had goggles that revealed Spader's navigation marks when donned. Anyone else walking past wouldn't see the marks. Radio contact proved an unreliable luxury working inside stone structures, so this old system of 'chalking the walls' had gone high-tech. Spader knew of some museums that adopted the invisible dye to tag and protect artifacts in valuable collections. They dye glowed with an eerie green aura when viewed with the goggles. There was no mistaking something tagged in the last twelve months. The dye wore off in time, or could be easily washed off, but otherwise it was a handy ace up his sleeve.

  Today, Spader was just marking their path. Gordon was the navigator. Leading the way, choosing their path confidently, all Gordon held was a compass in one hand and a blue pen in the other. Amazingly, he didn't need to backtrack even once. Four sets of roman tally marks were growing on his left inner forearm. There was one group of tallies for each compass direction. Each time Gordon chose a corridor, he marked its direction down on his arm. This was what Spader liked about Gordon. He tended to keep things simple. By looking at the number of tallies in proportion to each other, Gordon could tell where they were in the Gallery with perfect precision in relation to the entrance. It was ingenious. An incredibly simple and effective technique that worked. By knowing the length of the corridors and the number in each direction navigated, Gordon could locate their position within the Gallery to within one square meter.

  Gordon's system could lead them to the middle. He could not, however, find their way out again. His system didn't record the order in which they had chosen the corridors.

  That's where Spader's invisible dye came in.

  Gordon had a simple low-tech way to navigate in, while Spader had a complicated high-tech way to navigate out.

  They were a good team. They both had their jobs.

  Except this time, the 'way in' was going to be a lot more difficult than usual. Gordon would be doing the lion's share of the job if what they were standing in was really what they suspected it was.

  And Spader dearly hoped that it was. This job was worlds away from finding hidden antiquities in German-occupied Europe, Spader's specialty. When invading armies were on the doorstep, where did people hide their treasure?

  To find the answer, Spader learned as much as possible about the person who’d done the hiding. His work involved understanding human reactions under stress. But the work was dangerous and competitive.

  Then Spader had met Gordon and saw a new opportunity. Antiquities lost before modern written records. Objects people weren't sure even existed. Gordon believed that human motivations hadn't changed through time. Cultures always hid that which was most valuable to them.

  It was Spader’s job to find them.

  It was an invisible, victimless crime, because most of the time, no one even suspected there was anything worth stealing. When he did steal known artifacts, such as those Merc and Dale were right now securing, it was to hide his true goal.

  The Gallery was looking like their biggest haul yet. Spader could smell it.

  Gordon stopped abruptly in the corridor.

  Spader heard the explosion too, even from this far into the Gallery. 'Sounds like Fontana just took out the comm-tower. Nothing to worry about.'

  Gordon turned. 'That explosion sounded too big.'

  'It's just the way sound travels in here,' explained Spader. 'Fontana will get the job done.'

  Gordon grunted over his shoulder and kept walking. 'At least he's good at something.'

  Gordon stopped again. He stared at his arm. He turned, put the pen and compass in his pocket, and then placed both hands on the corridor wall. 'This is as close to the middle as we're going to get. Time to set up shop.'

  'This is the sweet-spot, right here?' asked Spader. They were in an east-west corridor between intersections. It looked like all the others.

  'Good as,' replied Gordon.

  Spader swung the heavy bag off his shoulder. 'Okay, you need help?'

  'Just be careful with that bag,' warned Gordon. 'I've pre-calibrated all those instruments. We don't have time to check them. Fire up the laptop for me. And get the fluoro lanterns humming. I'm going to need more light than this.'

  Spader started with the laptop computer. Gordon was talking to himself, reciting a mental list of the items he pulled from the bag. He placed them in precise order behind him on the stone floor. 'OK, now give me some room to work.'

  Spader took a fluoro lantern to inspect the carvings. The extra light revealed even greater levels of detail.

  What used to happen in this place? The closest examples Spader had seen elsewhere were of carved sexual acts on Indian temples. These carvings were similar in size, but very clearly modeled on different themes. In fact, there seemed only one theme - extreme violence and damage to the human body. Pain as opposed to pleasure. One conception, the other destruction.

  Spader felt the carvings competing for his attention, a perceptible force that redirected his eyes back to the violence when he tried to turn away. Until he blinked away the effect, the carvings forcefully shuttled his eyes from one piece of violent relief to the next.

  He shook off the feeling. Interpreting the carvings was pointles
s. That was another man's game. His goal was far more immediate and achievable.

  Spader watched Gordon work.

  Using a tape measure and red chalk, Gordon marked up a precise pattern of six red crosses on the corridor wall at chest-height. He gripped the chalk with his teeth as he worked the tape. Beside half of the crosses he'd written a letter 'C', beside the others he wrote a letter 'M'.

  Moving along the wall, his head resembled a nude coconut bobbing in the surf. His hair looked like those strings of husk left on a roughly peeled coconut.

  The top of Gordon’s coconut was bald.

  Spader had seen him simultaneously balance three different sets of glasses on that bald head. Right now he wore just one set, his usual bifocals with the black elastic strap to ensure he didn't need to constantly correct there position. Under his glasses, his flat cheeks looked very smooth for a fifty year old. When working, Gordon radiated energy and always moved like he had the body of a fit forty year old.

  Working rapidly now, he glued tiny micro-charges over all the red crosses.

  Ironically, in his day job, Gordon was a cultural conservator of ancient structures.

  His specialty was ancient construction methods. At a glance, Gordon could deduce the principal techniques applied to construct any ancient structure in the world. From memory, he could map the location of every significant ancient stone quarry in Europe, Asia, Africa and South America. In many cases, he could identity a particular stone's quarry of origin by simply using a hand lens to check its dominant minerals. But Gordon's true passion was any structure that fell outside of this understanding. Anything that didn't fit the mold. Anything that stood out like a sore thumb in the evolution of building practices and technological evolution. These were the only places where Gordon seemed truly alive.

  Like the Gallery. This place was his holy grail.

  In fact, Spader always felt that Gordon was born in the wrong time. A trip to Gordon's house was always a strange affair. He grew all his own food, and refused to eat anything non-organic. He used a hand-cranked washing machine and had no television. He'd never married. In fact, when he wasn't with Spader's team, Spader suspected Gordon had little to do with the outside world.

  Spader ran his flashlight over Gordon's marks on the wall. M stood for microphone. C stood for charge. But it was the spaces in between those marks that were vitally important.

  And Gordon was the best person in the world to ensure those spaces were precisely oriented.

  Among his valuable talents of growing tomatoes and washing clothes by hand, Gordon had also pioneered the technique of using micro-seismology to map cultural sites without causing damage. The technique drew from the science of locating oil reserves using earthquake tremors. By analyzing the way vibrations moved through the stone, Gordon could map hidden cavities and passageways. Like taking an x-ray of a building.

  'Gordon, how are we looking?'

  'Almost done. There...done. It's ready to go.'

  'How good is this going to be?'

  Gordon paused with the detonator ready to set off the charges. 'The more intact the structure, the better the vibrations can travel, the better the model. We'll know in a second. You ready?'

  'Do it.'

  'Don't move while I do this, OK? And turn your face away.'

  Spader turned his head so he could still see Gordon, but wasn't facing the charges.

  Gordon pressed the detonator, setting off the pattern of small explosions. To Spader, the sound wasn't very loud at all, and somewhat dulled, like a big firecracker going off underwater.

  When he looked back, all the explosive caps had dropped to the floor.

  Gordon stared at the laptop screen, hand over his mouth like he awaited a doctor’s prognosis. 'Here it is. Don't you want to...oh, sorry, you can move now. I only meant to stay still during the detonation.'

  Spader rushed to the laptop and saw the simple two-dimensional pattern zigzagging to life on screen. The image didn't stop growing, and had to resize itself twice to accommodate the information Gordon's model was synthesizing.

  Gordon actually stepped back from the computer, amazed at what was taking shape in front of him.

  'This is incredible. This grid work of tunnels goes all the way to the center, but I've never gotten results like this. This place is perfectly intact. It looks as new as the day they built it.'

  'How is that possible?'

  Without taking his eyes from the screen, Gordon said, 'Let me assure you that in the last six hundred years, building practices have gone backwards, not forwards. We've lost more than we've gained.'

  Gordon frowned and leant forward to rub something off the screen with his thumb. The mark didn't rub off. It was part of the model.

  'We've got a problem,' said Gordon, pointing to a hazy patch in one corridor. 'What is that?'

  Spader had seen this before. He was surprised Gordon didn't recognize the anomaly. 'That's us. See? We're close enough to the charges to register as a vibration bleed up from the floor.'

  'No,' Gordon shook his head, pointing to a different place on the screen. 'That's us, right there, closer to the epicenter of the charges. This is another anomaly behind us. Back the way we came. It's big too. Bigger than you and I combined.'

  Spader reflected on their path through the Gallery to this point. 'I didn't see anything on the way here.'

  Gordon glanced back towards the last intersection. 'That's because it's following us.'

  Chapter 9

  Ben McClintock glanced up hopefully at the computer technician.

  The two men were alone in the University's cavernous main lecture hall. Ben waited anxiously in the front row. His department's computer tech, Peter, the only one Ben could convince to attend at short notice, stood at the podium scratching his eyebrow.

  Working over Ben's laptop, Peter stepped back and shrugged apologetically. 'There's no video coming through. Everything's working fine. Ethan's just not sending any video from his end.'

  Ben asked, 'Are you sure it's not a network problem?'

  'I'm sure. Look, I have to go. I'm not even supposed to be touching this stuff outside of our department. The central guys will flip if they see me messing with their equipment.'

  'I know,' admitted Ben. 'I appreciate it. Thanks for trying.'

  As Peter left, Ben heard the crowd outside. At least two hundred people were waiting for Ethan's last lecture of the season. Ben's job involved coordinating Ethan's lectures from the University end, including all the online subscriptions.

  Does he want me to cancel the last lecture or not?

  After Joanne's death, Ethan had been completely out of reach. Ethan had never missed a lecture, but then again, he'd never had a close friend killed by a six hundred year old trap before.

  News of Joanne’s death hadn't reached the public yet, so more and more people were gathering for Ethan's lecture. In the last six months, Ben had needed to relocate to larger lecture halls twice to accommodate all the extra bums on seats. Enrolments in archaeology and anthropology courses were their highest in a decade.

  Ethan was a University celebrity.

  A celebrity who no longer answers his phone, apparently. Unable to reach Ethan by phone, Ben had sent an email to his Plaza mailing list, advising all subscribers that he might need to cancel Ethan's lecture. Within minutes, his email inbox was crowded with irritated messages demanding an explanation. Neither the University nor the police had gone public with the news of Joanne's death, so Ben could provide no answers.

  This being Ethan's last lecture for the season didn't help things. The last lecture always proved his most popular. If the last two seasons offered any indication, Ethan would reveal a fantastic new mystery. Like the season-finale of a popular TV show, Ethan always threaded the final lecture with archaeological cliffhangers.

  In the back of his mind, Ben suspected Ethan might come online and present the lecture in dedication to Joanne. It was unlikely, but Ben wanted everything to be ready, just in case.r />
  Ben's mobile phone rang. He snatched the phone from his pocket and checked the caller ID. It wasn't Ethan.

  Damn.

  The number looked familiar though. It originated from somewhere inside the University.

  Ben accepted the call. 'Hello?'

  'Hi Ben, this is Abigail Astrenzi. I'm sorry to call you like this, but Ethan told me to call you if I needed help in an emergency.'

  'Oh, Abby, right.' It took Ben a moment to remember the postdoctoral student Ethan had running pollen analyses on the Plaza. 'What's the problem?'

  'I can't reach Ethan or anybody else at the Plaza,’ she said. ‘I've called there about twenty times. I sent a stack of emails, but they haven't been checked at the other end. They're all just sitting there unopened. That's really strange, right?'

  'I haven't been able to get through either,' admitted Ben. 'I'm not at my desk to check my emails. I haven't been able to reach him on the phone for over an hour.'

  Abby asked, 'Has Ethan's live feed started where you are? I'm not seeing anything over this side of campus. I was waiting for his online lecture to start but it never came on. I really need to contact him.'

  Ben glanced at the blank computer monitor again. 'No. Nothing's come up over here. I'm in the main lecture theatre. I was waiting around in case he was starting late, but it doesn't look like he'll be up to it. You can imagine how he must be feeling.'

  'Feeling about what? What are you talking about? Have I missed something?'

  Ben slumped forward in the seat. Please don't let me be the one who has to tell her about Joanne. 'So you haven't heard anything?'

  'Heard anything about what?' Abigail’s voice was shrill. She hated being left out of the loop on anything to do with the site. 'What the hell's going on?'

  'Something happened on site this morning, but I shouldn't be the one telling you. I'm not sure who we're supposed to be telling at this stage.'

  Abby’s strained voice declared, 'Well, I know something frigging weird is affecting the ecology at that site, but I can't find anyone to tell!’